


Chapter This Is Getting Normal, 4.15 AM

by laughingpineapple



Category: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Genre: Fluff, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-17
Updated: 2012-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-16 12:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jowd is good at rolling with changes: as situations occur, he stands and observes and embraces the good and the odd that come his way. Their house is, after all, big enough and there is an intimate quiet in – no scratch that, he can hear laughter coming from the kitchen.<br/>(What they all lost)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chapter This Is Getting Normal, 4.15 AM

**Author's Note:**

> After I pointed out that it was interesting how Cabanela used Alma's name, thinking of her as her own person instead of simply framing her as Jowd's wife, Clover went and discovered that he doesn't even bother with honorifics in the Japanese script.   
> In explaining the nuance to the rest of us, their imagery of choice was "this is just so brazen, it's the verbal equivalent of walking around her house in his underwear and stealing yoghurt from her fridge".  
> Now if that's not a prompt I don't know what it is.

A quiet bell. Jowd silenced the alarm before it could reach his ladies, snorted, relinquished the blankets’ comfort and rolled out of bed like a self-appointed martyr, waiting to be properly woken up by the cold’s bites. No such luck, he estabilished, not with a sore lack of sleep weighing on his muscles and, in all honesty, not while shielded by a heavier flannel pajamas than even that harsh winter required. He rubbed his temples and fidgeted with the portable torch that he used to get around their house at those ungodly hours in the morning.

  
At the end of the corridor, after a deep yawn that had him squint for long enough that he could have fallen asleep again if he’d just been leaning on a wall, the sudden flash of white reflected under the torch’s light blinded him for a moment. Jowd scoffed at the spotless coat hanging on the wall, lowered the torch and stared at the nearby deep purple nightgown to soothe his wounded eyes.  
 _Do we have to sign an ordinance for him to use the hanger by the door like everyone else?_ , his reflexes provided as a viable disgruntled retort, but that was that. Scorned, yes, chromatically unsettled, yes, and yes the world had no right to be bright and shiny before eight in the morning nor especially “inspirational white” before nine thirty, but all in all Jowd felt as surprised as a grazing cow. The notion filtered to a conscious level.   
  
He and Alma had barely had the time to adjust to the idea of ‘three’ as the new number that would be describing the rest of their lives and there they were. Four. During the winter season at least, as a migratory quirk, when snow covered the streets outside and their dinners unfolded into cozy chats that glowed until late in the evening. It would take crueler hosts than them to throw the man back to his bicycle and leave him to pedal back to his own apartment – besides, they were twenty minutes closer to the police station.  
Besides-besides, the first time he had just fallen asleep on the couch as they were discussing redecorating Kamila’s room and they had a blanket to spare. He’d woken them up the following morning with two glasses of a distinctly professional latte, so professional that, as it turned out, it came from the diner across the street. Said he couldn’t find the cocoa powder to put a satisfactory finish on the one he would’ve made them himself and that it was better to cheat than leave a work half done – fair enough, Alma could never find it either. Mostly because cocoa powder had a tendency to be short-lived, but that was neither here nor there and cakes were more up his alley anyway.  
  
So. Jowd called them as he saw them and what he saw was four. Looking back on one, two years prior, he could remember all that hinged on his promotion to the detective division, all his ideals and expectations. What he had not expected was for someone other than Alma – and now Kamila, already so vibrant, so piercing in her tiny smiles – to stop being _people_. People, he could keep at a distance. People were comfortable. People were easily managed and often impressed. But everything this side of Jowd’s safety horizon was his blind spot and allowing anyone to muck around in that private, defenceless space was an act of absolute trust, given and received. It did not just happen.   
Usually.  
  
They wondered, he and Alma, if Cabanela burned through all the steps in his life with the same impetus and what sort of ruins he left behind. If he wound up etched so vividly on all those close to him and just how many would let him close enough. He barely mentioned friends.  
And he saw himself give in, like a dusty wall crumbling, and he asked himself where the wall imagery had even come from since he did not feel like he had ever posed an active resistance in the first place. In one of those moments of absolute clarity that fall between four and four-thirty in the morning, he felt instead a conceptual closeness to the couch, ultimately molded by its regular dwellers. Which by the way included himself and once he came to that point he felt that he was losing his metaphors, so he settled for turning around and sending a thankful glance to said couch and to the lanky cluster of elbows and ankles that he’d left resting there some hours earlier, entangled in a complex geometrical feud with his blankets.  
Except the blankets were pulled up on empty cushions and he could hear a polite chortle coming from the other side of the corridor.  
He followed the trail of chuckles and a thin blade of light leading to the kitchen door. Three steps from it, a metallic clink struck and brought about complete silence. He opened the door, shielding his eyes from the sudden brightness.  
“And hello to you two.”   
  
Alma, in her pink ribbon pajamas, leaned on the fridge braiding her hair lock by lock like everything was right with the world, which it admittedly was. More to the point, Cabanela, sporting a spotless white set of sweatshirt and shorts, was balancing on tip toes and holding an opened glass yoghurt vase like a torch carrier.  
“Might I inquire as to…?”  
“Partying. Nothing like it, baby!” He slouched on the nearby table. “Espeeecially with no work in the morning, no offence meant.”  
“None taken. You could take my next early shift, on the other hand, I have it on good authority that it works wonders for insomnia.”  
“You’re not the boss of me, Jowd!”  
“You just wait.”  
“I’m good at waaaiting, baby”   
“What about getting better at answering?”  
“I was saving your yoghurt.”  
“From its expiry date?”  
“You know expiry daaates, baby, they’re the wooorst kind of date. Would you inflict them upon some yoghurt?”  
“Never mind him ad his modesty”, said Alma. “He was saving it for, not from.”  
His modesty, right. He wasn’t so far asleep that he’d hit his inner snooze button and pass a hint that big. _I’m all ears, Alma, do go on._  
“For what, then?”  
“For my dear friends, what eeelse?” Cabanela hopped on his feet and initiated a slow, drawn-out bow, every gesture exhaggerated to grasp for time and ideas. “Becaaause.”  
“The vase, you were saying?”, Alma offered.  
“The vase, right. Because I need the vase! It will look great with, ah.”  
“Iron wire.”  
With his face inches away from the floor, Cabanela twisted his neck to look at his prompter. _Is that a thing, baby? That one can do?_ , his stare asked.  
Alma blinked. _Of course it is, sweetie. Would I ever lie to you?_  
Jowd could see him squint as he got up again, either kickstarting his cherished intuition or doing the decent thing for once and putting some effort in a mnemonic scan of the house as he looked for a viable bluff.  
“The candle. It’s for the candle on the wiiindow by the dining taaable, the leaky one. A classy candle holder for my lovely hosts.”  
“How thoughtful of you, my friend. I am moved. Truly. So you got up in the middle of the night to fix up a decorative candle?”  
“Ah, Jowd”, Alma said, “that was my bad. I thought Kamila was crying and couldn’t get any more sleep, so I came here to read. I woke him up by mistake passing by the living room.”  
“As the lady said. And I can’t heeelp being resourceful, baby.”  
He caught a flash of violet in the corner of his eye. Alma was fiddling with a lock of hair, nodding at every sentence, stretching her elegant neck just so toward the cupboard until Jowd remembered the clinking noise. Not the cupboard, then. A bit lower.  
“I shall be expecting that candle holder by tomorrow, then? I would not dare question your words, after all.”  
“Of course, baby. Of cooourse.”  
“…as proven by the used spoon in the sink… of course.” He put on his best amiable smile, suppressing the urge for silence and coffee. Those two. Much as he loved it all, couldn’t it wait until lunch?

  
  
“I’ll have you knooow”, Cabanela’s voice reached him as he turned the key, followed by a “Hush, you’ll wake her up!”, “Sorry, baby, where are my manners” and rushed steps closing in. Jowd waited to hear what the big deal was–   
 “My favourite is red fruits. Low fat, thanks”, he whispered with a gallant grin.  
“Not your boss. Definitely not your housekeeper. Good morning.”   
–before closing the front door to his face. Everything was right with the world.


End file.
